Filled with a desperate exaltation, he glanced at the house, sleeping in the white sun glare, then took her wrists and dragged her down to the sea. Her feet made two grooves in the wet sand. He dragged her through the surf and into the stiller water. Her weight in the water was as nothing. He yanked the towel from her head, and her long black hair floated out. He tied the towel around his neck. The sand was washed from her dead face. It was unmarked. He worked her out into deeper water, got behind her, and wrapped his thick arms around her, contracting her lungs and then letting them expand, contracting them again. They would fill with seawater. There would be sand in her lungs also. But that would be a normal thing for one who had died in the sea. If they found her.
He floated and looked at the house again. Safe so far. He wound his hand in her black hair and with a determined side-stroke took her on out, pausing to rest from time to time. When he thought he was far enough out, he stopped. He let her go, and she seemed to sink, but the process was so slow that he lost patience. Her face was a few inches below the surface and her eyes, half open, seemed to watch him. He thrust her down, got his feet against her body and pushed her farther. He was gasping with weariness, and the beach suddenly seemed to be an alarming distance away. As he tried to float a wave broke in his face. He coughed and avoided panic. When rested, he began to work his way back to the beach. He scuffed out the marks of her dragging feet, walked up to the blanket. The eye cups lay there. He spread the towel out to dry, picked up the eye cups and then the blanket, to shake it. He shook it once and then it slipped from his fingers. Her bathing cap had been under the blanket. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He trembled. He picked up the blanket again, shook it, put the eye cups on it next to the bottle of sun lotion.
With the cap in his hand, balled tightly, he walked back to the sea. He swam out, but he could not be sure of the place. When he knew that he could not find her, he left the cap in the sea and swam slowly back.
He walked to the showers behind the house and stood under the cold water for a long time. He went up to his room, meeting no one. He stripped, laid a towel across himself, and stared up at the high ceiling.
He cried for a little while and did not know why.
There was a feeling of having lost his identity. As though the act of murder had made him into another person. The old fear was gone, and now there was a new fear. “I am Carl Branneck,” he whispered. “Now they can’t do anything to me. They can’t do anything. Anything. Anything.”
He repeated the one word like an incantation until he fell asleep.
Park Falkner was awakened from his nap by the sound of low voices, of a woman’s laugh. He stretched like a big lean cat and came silently to his feet. He was tall and hard and fit, a man in his mid-thirties, his naked body marked with a half dozen violent scars. He was sun-darkened to a mahogany shade. A tropical disease had taken, forever, hair, eyebrows, and lashes, but the bald well-shaped head seemed to accentuate the youthfulness of his face. The lack of eyebrows and lashes gave his face an expressionless look, but there was rapacity in the strong beaked nose, both humor and cruelty in the set of the mouth. He stepped into the faded tubular Singhalese sarong, pulled it up, and knotted it at his waist with a practiced motion. Except for the monastic simplicity of his bed, the room was planned for a Sybarite: two massive built-in couches with pillows and handy bookshelves; a fireplace of gray stone that reached up to the black-beamed ceiling; a built-in record player and record library that took up half of one wall, complete with panel control to the amplifiers located all over the house and grounds; an adjoining bath with a special shower stall, large enough for a platoon. The four paintings, in lighted niches, had been done on the property by guest artists. Stimulated by a certain freedom that existed on Falkner’s Grouper Island, they were pictures that the rather prominent artists would prefer not to show publicly.
One whole wall of the bedroom was of glass, looking out over a small private terrace and over the sea. Park Falkner padded out across his terrace and looked down to the next one below. It extended farther out than did his own.
The conversation below had ceased. The two wheeled chaise longues were side by side. The little waitress from Winter Haven, Pamela, lay glassy and stunned by the heat of the sun, her lips swollen. Carlos Berreda, his brown and perfect body burnished by the sun, insistently stroked her wrist and the back of her hand. He leaned closer and closer to her lips. Park Falkner went quickly back into his bedroom and returned with the silver-and-mahogany thermos jug. He lifted the cap and upended it over the two below. Slivers of ice sparkled out with the water.
Carlos gave a hoarse and angry shout and Pamela screamed. Park held the empty jug and smiled down at them. They were both standing, their faces upturned. Pamela was pink with embarrassment.
“Have you forgotten?” Park said in Spanish. “Tomorrow in Monterrey you will meet two friends, Carlos. Friends that weigh five hundred kilos apiece and have long horns. This is no time for indoor sports.”
The angry look left Carlos’s face, and he gave Park a shamefaced grin. “Muy correcto, jefe. But the little one is so... is so...”
“She’s all of eighteen, Señor Wolf.”
“What’re you saying about me?” Pamela demanded.
“That you’re a sweet child, and we want you to come and watch the practice.”
They went down to the patio behind the house. Carlos’s sword handler brought the capes, laid them out on a long table, and, with weary tread, went over to the corner and came back trundling the practice device, the bull’s head and horns mounted at the proper height on a two-wheeled carriage propelled by two long handles.
Carlos grinned at Pamela. “Watch thees, muñequita.” He snapped the big cape, took his stance, made a slow and perfect and lazy veronica as the horns rolled by. The sweating assistant wheeled the horns and came back from the other direction. Carlos performed a classic gaonera. Pamela sat on the table by the capes and swung her legs.
She frowned. “But it isn’t like having a real bull, is it?” she said.
Park laughed, and Carlos flashed the girl a look of hot anger. “Not exactly, niña.” The sword handler guffawed.
After Carlos went through his repertoire with the big cape, Park Falkner took the muleta and sword and, under Carlos’s critical eye, performed a series of natural passes, topping them off with manoletinas to the right and to the left.
“How was it?” Park asked.
Carlos grinned. “The sword hand on the natural passes. Eet ees not quite correcto, señor, but eet ees good. You could have been a torero had you started when young.”
“Let me try!” Pamela said.
Park moved over into the shade. Carlos had to reach around her to show her the correct positions of the hands on the cape. Three more of the houseguests came out to the patio. Taffy Angus, a hard-voiced, silver-haired ex-model, over forty but still exceedingly lovely. Johnny Loomis, the loud, burly, red-faced sports reporter from Chicago, ex-All American, current alcoholic. Steve Townsend, the small, wry, pale man who had arrived in response to Park Falkner’s enigmatic wire.
Park pushed a handy button and a few moments later Mick Rogers, wearing his look of chronic disgust on his battered face, appeared in the opposite doorway, which opened into the kitchen. He winked at Park, disappeared, returned almost immediately, pushing a pale blue bar decorated with coral-colored elephants in various poses of abandon. The glasses clinked as he rolled it over into the shade in the opposite corner.